A Long Hot Christmas

He was silent for a second. “It’s black tie.”

“No problem,” said Hope.

“Five.”

“The 48th Street entrance.”

“I’ll be there.”

It was sort of a relief knowing she could delay coming home tomorrow. What was it with this apartment?

What was it with Maybelle and all that tsk-tsking? “Sorry for the interruption,” she said, settling down again and feeling relieved when Maybelle followed suit. “Let’s see, we’d gotten past the bull…”

“Yeah. Anyhoo,” Maybelle said, picking up the thread without difficulty, “I got right bored that first winter after he was gone, what with nobody to fight with and only three channels on the television. But one morning I was watching this arithmetic program, Geometry, they call it—”

Hope’s eyes widened.

“You know, one of them college courses they do on TV? Anyway, right after that they was advertising these University of Texas—” She pronounced it “Tegzis.” “—correspondence courses and I sent off for the catalog. Whoo-ee, what a lot of junk you could learn without setting foot off the ranch!”

Hope felt her brain whirling in slow ellipses. Getting a little closer to Earth, then spinning way out into space. “So you sent off for a Geometry course.”

“Calculus. I’d pretty much gotten the hang of Geometry and the catalog said take Calculus next.”

“Oh.”

“Then a course in lit-tra-chure.”

“Contemporary American literature?”

“Nope, Mid-yeeval. You know, them sexy Canterbury Tales? Whoo-ee, they sure made me wish I had Hadley back for a long weekend. Then I said to myself, ‘Girl, your hands are way more bored than your head.’ And that was the truth, what with the ranch hands doing the outside work and their wives coming in to clean and cook. So I took a beautician course.”

“A correspondence course in hairdressing?” The ellipse lengthened dramatically.

“Yeah. Well, that was a bust, with nobody but the sheep to practice on. The ranch hands’ wives wouldn’t let me get anywhere close to them with my shears. But I can do my own hair real good,” she said cheerfully. “Saved me many a penny, let me tell you.”

“I can see that,” Hope murmured. “How long did it take you to finish all those courses.”

“Almost six months! Them courses was hard!” Maybelle’s gaze shot over her shoulder, then flitted from one corner of the room to the other. “Honey,” she said suddenly, “have you got an extry mirror I could hang over there on that wall?”

“Mirror? Well, no, all the mirrors are sort of attached to things, or doing their various…”

“No matter. I’ll bring some by tomorrow.” She frowned. “Don’t want to wait long, though. Anyways, next thing I did was try my hand at making dishes and stuff. Old man Abernathy brung the kiln out to the ranch in his big truck and I did that until the ladies got to complaining about dusting all the new crockery. Then landscape design, but I couldn’t get nuthin’ much to grow out there in West Texas but cactus. This place sure could use some greenery,” she added.

Hope wondered if Maybelle could be trying to hypnotize her. This was the most outrageous—at least the most different—face it, the most interesting conversation she’d had in ages. And she didn’t have to say a word, just listen to Maybelle’s chirping voice, which went so well with her chicken-like appearance. She could listen to Maybelle and think about Sam Sharkey. She was going out with Sam tomorrow night. No, not really going out with Sam, just accompanying Sam, protecting him from the boss’s wife, but still…

“…feng shui,” she heard Maybelle say.

Hope switched gears.

“And I said what the heck is that? So naturally I had to find out. And you know what I found out?” The question was clearly rhetorical, because Maybelle forged on. “If I’d known all that stuff before, Hadley and me might of got along a sight better.”

“How.” It wasn’t a question, just a polite murmur. How could anybody get along with this idiot savant? Poor Hadley must have thought he’d died and gone to everlasting steam heat turned way up by the time the honeymoon was over. He’d apparently been desperate enough to engage in combat with a bull. Didn’t that say something about the mood the man was in?

“That’s what I’m going to show you, hon,” Maybelle said with another of those abrupt softenings of her usual shrillness. She shot up out of the armchair, shouldered a brown leather purse that reminded Hope of a feedbag and got the Stetson twirling on one finger. “Can I have the run of the house for a coupla weeks?”

Absolutely not! Hope got up, too. “First I really do insist on having an—”

“—estimate. Budget.” Maybelle sighed. “Honest to gosh, if you yuppies could get your minds off money for a split second…”

She was moving rapidly toward the door with Hope in her wake. “…and credentials,” Hope said firmly. “Was the correspondence course the end of your professional training?”

Maybelle spun. “Lands no! I spent two years in Chiner and Jap-pan learning everything they had to teach me, then I come up here and got me the kind of degree you young folks understand. The Parsons School of Design. So don’t you worry none about my credentials.”

“Well. Okay, here’s a key.” The voice that uttered those utterly reckless words was strange, yet familiar. It was her own voice. That’s why she recognized it.

Hope promised herself she’d call the insurance company first thing in the morning. Have an art appraiser out. Determine the current value of the African head and the glass bowl. Adjust the insurance accordingly. And when this nonsense was over, she’d hire a proper Manhattan decorating firm to undo the damage.

She would never see Sheila again.

And tomorrow night she was going out with Sam Sharkey.

A little thrill shot straight down through the center of her body just thinking about it.

SAM GUESSED he’d been looking for a brown-haired woman with green eyes and a face to match.

As he stepped out of the luxurious Lincoln he’d hired for the evening, he scanned the crowd surging through the doors of the office building into the blustery wind of December and didn’t find anyone who fit that description. The woman who waved and stepped briskly toward the limo was something else again.

“Hope?”

She smiled. “Am I late?”

“Right on time.”

First thing, her face wasn’t green. Of course he hadn’t really expected it to be. He wasn’t prepared, though, for creamy skin or full, glistening lips, for the even thicker, darker lashes that framed her eyes—still green, thank God. And her hair. Why had he thought it was brown? Must have been wet. This woman had hair the color of copper pipe.

Maybe she’d dyed it to match her product.

Under a thick, soft-looking cape, she was wearing a tuxedo. So was he, but the only similarity was their satin lapels. Hers had a short skirt, for one thing, and some kind of low-necked black-lace top under the jacket instead of a white shirt and bow tie. And the jacket poofed out at the top and in at the waist in a way that almost made him forget the reason she was with him in the first place.

For a second he felt like somebody had gut-punched him.

He slid into the car first and let the driver help Hope in beside him. He helped her shrug off the cape—cashmere, by its feel—and pretty soon she was showing him a pair of long, long legs with smooth, slender knees in sheer black stockings. Something bubbled up inside him that was supposed to simmer, covered, for another five years or so, until he really got his feet on the legal ground.

The next thing she was showing him was a laptop. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said, perching it carefully on top of those pretty knees. “I was into something important when I realized it was time to change jackets.”

“Be my—” he paused to clear his throat “—guest. I brought work along, too.”

Even before he got to that last line he was looking at her profile, at a big emerald earring on a really cute ear that had a thick bunch of shiny hair tucked behind it, at slim hands with long fingernails painted a sort of ginger-peachy color that matched her lipstick, fingernails that went tap-tap, tap-tap-tap on the computer keys.